When washing clothes, consumers often want the fabric to come out looking clean and having other benefits, such as freshness. Conventional detergents may not have the desired benefits that consumers want since they are designed to remove soils and stains from the fabric, and may not effectively deposit other benefit agents onto the fabrics.
Different surfactants have different soil removal capabilities. For example, anionic surfactants may provide particularly good performance on hydrophobic soils such as triglycerides found in food greases, fats and oils, whereas nonionic surfactants may be more effective at suspending soils, and removing soils such as waxes, paraffins and fatty acids. Combining anionic and non-ionic surfactants is known to improve the soil removal effectiveness of anionic surfactants, makes the detergent more robust to hardness differences, and enables washing at colder temperatures. Therefore, it may be desirable to provide a detergent composition having a variety of surfactants at appreciable levels, so that the detergent composition can provide a broad cleaning profile under a broad range of consumer conditions.
It may also be desirable to provide a detergent composition that contains ingredients, such as encapsulates that include a benefit agent, that deposit on a surface such as a fabric. For example, the encapsulates may include perfume raw materials, which release over time. Encapsulation of benefit agents is known to improve deposition efficiency. Coating encapsulates is known to further improve deposition, however deposition efficiency remains low. Low deposition efficiency can be a problem, particularly when the detergent composition comprises surfactant. As surfactants typically take materials away from a surface in a washing process, the encapsulates may not deposit efficiently onto the target surface.
There is a need for improved detergent compositions that include encapsulates.